Into the Woods
by Bird of Poetry
Summary: Jake and Rachel live in a different world from their friends. Sometimes they wonder if they'll ever come home – or if they'll even want to.


"Into the woods, it's time to go.

It may be all in vain, I know.

Into the woods, but even so,

I have to take the journey."

– from "Into the Woods" by Steven Sondheim

**I.**

Sometimes I have dreams where I'm the tiger, and I'm about to hunt down Tom, or David, or myself, with Temrash behind my eyes. But Rachel is standing behind me, and she's not in morph, but when she reaches out and grabs my tail, I can't move. She has an iron grip holding me back, and no matter how much I struggle, I can't break free.

It's one of my favorite dreams. I wake up feeling so much less tired.

Both of us spar with Ax in the woods sometimes, as a way of letting off steam, and of spending time with Ax in a way that works for all of us. One time I watched them fight, Ax's precise tail strikes against Rachel's reckless charges. Afterward, I said, "Hey, Rachel. Can I have a turn?"

«I'm afraid I am too tired to continue, Prince Jake.»

"Not with you, Ax. With Rachel."

Rachel shrugged her massive bear shoulders. «Sure.»

I morphed the tiger. It was wary of this other predator. It wanted to leave, give it space, avoid a fight. I watched Rachel, and suddenly wondered on what terms we were even fighting. Our fights with Ax have rules, limits. But when it came to sparring with Rachel, how far was too far? If I went for her throat, would she blow up in a rage and ask me what the fuck I was doing? Or worse, would she let me?

«I don't think this is a good idea,» I said.

Rachel relaxed, and only then did I realize how tense she'd been. «I was hoping you'd say that.»

We both demorphed. Ax was watching us with his stalk eyes, his main eyes turned aside like he was trying to make himself look away from something private.

"How do Andalites spar?" I asked. It was an oddly cold night for California. I shivered a little in my morphing outfit.

«We never land a blow, even with the flat of the blade. We stop just short, like I do when I hold a blade to someone's throat without drawing blood. It is about the knowledge that your opponent could kill you if he so much as breathed. That he is in just the right position, past your defenses.»

I looked at Rachel and nodded. "That makes sense."

«In fact, it is traditional for one's older cousins to first teach a child the art of tail fighting. Of course, the two of you are the same age.»

Actually, Rachel is a few weeks older than me. Enough that she used to tease me about it when we were little, but not enough to matter. We didn't have anyone to guide us. We just had to teach each other.

**II.**

Sometimes Rachel has to come in the middle of the night. Not because of a mission or anything, but just because she has to. She's careful about it. She always checks first to see if Tom is awake. She raps quietly at the window and I wake up and open it. I'm a light sleeper these days.

One night – I remember it was a full moon, or nearly there, because her hair looked silver instead of blonde – she demorphed without a word and sat on the edge of my bed, elbows on her knees, the tips of her fingers pressed to her mouth.

I lay on top of my covers and waited. If she was going to say anything at all (sometimes she doesn't) there was no point rushing it.

Her voice was muffled against her fingertips. "I kissed Cassie." Then she looked over her shoulder at me, her eyes defiant, ready for my fury.

But there was only an empty place in my chest where the anger should be. "When?"

"Today. After school." I found myself picturing it, even though I really shouldn't: Rachel and Cassie in the woods, streaks of sunlight shining on their faces through the leaves as Rachel backed Cassie against a tree and stole a fierce kiss. "She said she needed to talk. She had this terrible nightmare last night. She was walking in the woods when that wolf pack found her, the ones we ran into that time in the beginning. They wanted her wolf morph back. They attacked her and tore it out of her like it was an internal organ. The way she said it was more colorful than that, but no point in repeating the gory details. Anyway, she was crying, and I started crying a little too.

"She said she was sorry for crying on me, it was just that it made her so sad to dream about animals turning on her, when she's never really been afraid of them like that. She said she didn't want to think that way, like nature was her enemy, not even in dreams. And I decided to kiss her because it was so _innocent_, you know. Compared to why I was crying. I just wanted her to know how sweet she was, for being the way she is."

My mental image changed. I saw Rachel and Cassie cross-legged on her bedroom rug with tearstained faces, Rachel's hand on the nape of Cassie's neck, and Rachel drew her closer until their foreheads touched, then their lips. I didn't have to ask why Rachel cried. I would have felt the same way, if I had to imagine something tearing the tiger out of me. "What about Tobias?" I said.

Rachel folded her arms. "What about him? He's a hawk. He doesn't kiss me."

"So you've told him, then," I said. "If what he thinks doesn't matter anyway."

Her eyes flashed in the moonlight. "He wouldn't be mad. He doesn't think he owns me."

He doesn't, of course. Tobias doesn't think he has a right to anything. I said, "I don't think I own Cassie. Or if I do, you own her just as much. And she owns herself even more."

She tilted her head. "Is that why you're not mad?"

If I saw Cassie crying like that, I would kiss her too. I'd only kissed her once, but I would do it again. Rachel might do it again, or it might be a one-off. None of these facts seemed to have any connection to each other. They were just true. "Normal people have a boyfriend or girlfriend, and they have family, and they have friends. But we're not normal people. We don't really have any of those things."

"Or we have all of them," Rachel said, "but they're all the same thing."

I wondered if Cassie pulled away from the kiss, or let it happen, or even returned it. I wondered if it made her feel better about her nightmare. "Yeah," I said. "Something like that. That's why I'm not mad."

**III.**

There's one recurring dream I have that I'll never tell Rachel about. I dream that the Drode finally manages to strike a deal with her. She'll get more power than Erek reprogrammed, enough power to tear apart the Yeerk Empire with her bare hands, if she kills me. Every time, she kills me a different way. In my dreams, she's disemboweled me, crushed me, even pinned me down and throttled me, human body to human body, whispering, "Don't worry, Jake, I'll win the war for you."

When I have that dream, I go to her. I demorph in her bedroom, still shaking with fear. Not because I'm afraid of dying at her hands, but because I'm afraid of what she would do with Crayak's power afterward. She'd win the war, sure. But she'd never stop there.

When I come, she turns back the covers and invites me into bed. I always hesitate, even though I know it'll make me feel better. We're not kids anymore. It's uncomfortable to act like one just because I've had a nightmare. But I do it anyway. We barely fit on the bed at first, but as I get less embarrassed, I cuddle up to her more, until her elbow digs into my side and her hair gets in my face so I'm afraid I'll get spit on it. Her covers smell citrusy, like the lip gloss she always uses.

It was after Tom's Yeerk got homicidal at Grandpa G's cabin that I finally got up the courage to ask Rachel the question that always nags at me after I have that dream. I stared up at her rose-pink ceiling and said, "What would you do if I died?"

"Curse you out at the funeral, in front of Jean and Steve and everybody," she said. "Then hand the reins to Marco. Well, no, I'd do that first, just to be safe."

I rolled onto my side to look at her. "What?"

"Don't play dumb. You hold my leash. You're the reason I need one. Someone else needs to hold it if you die. I give Marco a lot of shit, but I trust him to do it. Cassie and Tobias would keep him from doing anything too fucked up."

I thought about Marco making the call about when and where to deploy Rachel. I was thinking about her like the atom bomb. Who has the keys to launch the missiles? Marco wouldn't like it, but Rachel was right: he'd know what to do. How to use her. How to hold her back. He could be a good leader. Not in the beginning, when he cared more about what the war meant for his family than anything else. But then, in the beginning, Rachel could have been as good a leader as me. I could have been her weapon. But all of that's changed.

"What if you died?" I said suddenly.

She looked at me like I was stupid. "Then we'd have made it count." Unspoken: _duh_. I wished I hadn't asked. How could she know that everything we sacrificed would be worth it? What about a free world was so wonderful that it was worth all of this? We didn't live in that free world. Not anymore. We probably never would again.

**IV.**

Over the years, I've wondered why so many of our nightmares are set in the woods. We don't fight in the woods, usually. If anything, I have more good memories of the woods than bad. Picnics with my friends. Making out with Cassie. Visiting Ax's scoop. But still, my worst dreams start when I walk into the woods, on two feet or on four. Marco, Rachel, and Cassie have all told me the same thing. Maybe it's because in the fairy tales, dark and terrible things happen in the woods, and it still feels like they _should_ happen there, not in the golf courses, schoolyards, and hospitals where we've fought our battles.

The end is coming soon. I'm reminded every time someone at school tries to comfort me about Marco's disappearance, because they know how close we are, they say. This lie is getting to be one too many.

I see Cassie after school, unchaining her bike from the rack. She rubs her neck self-consciously, and her palm comes away shiny with lip gloss. Rachel kissed her today. In school. I imagine them in the girls' bathroom, Cassie trying to keep quiet in the stall as Rachel's lips moved on her neck.

"Ride with me?" I ask her. She nods. I get my bike, and we pedal side by side down a shortcut through some abandoned lots.

"Don't be angry with her," Cassie says.

"Of course I'm angry with her," I say. "I had to _force_ her to demorph to keep from bleeding out. I'm not going to get over that in a hurry."

"That's not what I'm talking about and you know it," she says levelly.

I sigh. "She told me about the first time. I wasn't angry then and I'm not angry now. I'm just worried. What happened?"

"It doesn't have to be because something terrible happened," Cassie says.

I think about the times we've kissed. It's always after one of us almost dies. "But it was. Wasn't it?"

Cassie sighs. "Don't freak out, OK? It was Crayak. Trying to get her to kill you. Again."

"Let me guess. Unlimited fighting power. Everything she'd need to beat the Yeerks."

Cassie bites her lip. "Yeah. And when that didn't work, he threatened me. I think she was just… happy that I was in one piece."

"All right. I get it. That's fine. But am I the only one who cares how Tobias feels about this?"

Cassie smiles lopsidedly at me. "You don't know much about Rachel and Tobias, do you?"

"Never mind." I pause to steer my bike around some potholes. "And what about you? How do you feel?"

"Like you two love me for pretty much the same reason," she says, and my heart skips a beat. I've never said as much. But of course she would know. "You two do so many things for the same reasons. It's like living in a house of mirrors."

I brake suddenly, and Cassie brakes beside me, just as I knew she would. I lean down and kiss her on the mouth. The citrus taste of lip gloss – not Cassie's – gives me courage. I pull back and say, "I love you."

Cassie laughs with delight. "It took Rachel kissing me in the girls' locker room to get you to finally say that?"

"The girls' locker room! What if someone saw you?" Cassie rolls her eyes. "What can I say? She's an inspiring example."

"Funny," Cassie says, with that lopsided smile again. "That's what she says about you."

Cassie looks up at the branches above us, and the sunlight falls green-gold through the leaves to break her face into bright and dark. We're nearly to the woods by her house. The fairy tales aren't true, not even the way they feel true when you're a little kid. These woods are the safest place I know. When we're here, we don't have names or addresses or anything the Yeerks can track down. We have the wolves and the owls and even the skunks. Deeper in the woods, there's Ax's scoop and Tobias' territory, and even farther in, the Hork-Bajir valley. The deeper we go, the more friends we have.

The end is coming soon. I know that means we'll have to go into the woods. In the beginning, I would have been scared. But now, I think Rachel and I will like it better in there.


End file.
